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I’m curious, why is it awkward to write with a regular Russian keyboard layout? Presumably due to punctuation and not due to the Cyrillic characters?

I had to deal with 1C once for a client who insisted on reconciling his (mid-9 figure) assets into it. The good part of it is that a competent 1C programmer (of which he had 2) can basically make it do anything, exactly like SAP, but the out of the box experience is terrible.

There's also Kumir, which is an educational programming language used in Russian schools

But they simply weren't able to sustain it.

In the West, while the military industry initially pushed computer development, private companies quickly adapted those technologies for the consumer market. Over time, the Western consumer market became vastly larger than the military one.

In the USSR, this cross-pollination wasn't possible because anything that even touched the military was immediately classified as a state secret. This obsession with secrecy even affected civilian infrastructure like nuclear power plants. Plant operators weren't fully trained on how the systems worked under extreme conditions, and they were kept completely in the dark about inherent design flaws—because in the Soviet system, everything was by definition perfect and superior to the West.

Furthermore, because the consumer market was strictly controlled by the government and the party, the Soviet economy lacked any organic market signals regarding what people actually wanted or needed. Apparatchiks had to look elsewhere for data, so they resorted to copying Western solutions—sometimes just copying the basic concept (like a radio where users could choose their own stations), and sometimes cloning the entire machine.

While Soviet scientists had some highly innovative and interesting ideas in the beginning, central planners eventually decided it was faster and easier to copy a Western solution that was already 5, 10, or 15 years ahead in mass production.

Their semiconductor manufacturing was 10-15 years behind the Western technology. They just didn’t have the capability. Despite that they had good brains and delivered efficiently with what they had.

There'd be other interesting implications as well, socialist systems were more open to the idea of cybernetics and with a proper computer industry the Soviets might have had more room to explore it.

Mind you I still think it would have likely been impossible for political reasons, there were many structural incentives to falsify economic data in the USSR due to the high degree of corruption and patronage among the nomenklatura. The whole point of cybernetics is to treat economic problems as systems problems and expose data transparently, and given the USSR was structurally dependent on falsifying this data suddenly having an accurate picture might have actually been destabilising kind of like how Glasnost turned out to be.

Another interesting 'Soviets had decent computers' counterfactual is that the Chernobyl disaster might have been prevented, since the Kurchartov Institute would have been better able to characterise the processes in the bottom of the fatally flawed RBMK in low power regimes before it was put into mass production. Again this might not have actually helped, the overconfidence the Soviet system had in its scientific and technical institutions was high and genuinely really interesting.

That was my feeling when I first heard about Lisp Machines. It's unfortunate that I never got to see or use one in person.

In my school we had a Logo-like PL where you controlled a kangaroo and a more complex one where you сontrolled a robot arm with an internal stack that worked on a rectangular array of items. I remember the robot blowing up when you triggered a logical error like going out of bounds or a stack over/underflow.

UPD: The PLs were called "Roo&Robby" and written by https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mark_Sapir before he emigrated to the US.

Few fixes:

1. "ИМЕНА" is plural, so instead of "NAME:" it's a bit more appropriate to use "NAMES:". Probably should be "VARIABLES" or "VARS" in modern context.

2. You've got few typos mixing "R" and "P". Should be "R" everywhere.

3. Instead of "ALL" you should use "DONE".

4. Instead of "KNC" you should use "END".

So it would look like this:

    FUNC FACT (N);
      NAMES: R;
      1 -> R;
      FOR I FROM 1 TO N ::
        R * I -> R
      DONE
    RES: R
    END;

    FOR N FROM 0 TO 6 ::
      ? "FACT(", N, ") = ", FACT(N)
    DONE;

>It feels like Pascal in Cyrillic

replace cyrillic w/ russian and it'd be ok.

КНЦ = end (конец in russian is end). However, in bulgarian in means 'thread' (as in sewing thread) and it has lots its meaning of end, aside from 'from needle to thread' expression where it means from the tip of the needle to the end of the thread.

Also 'ALL' (и все = it's over/that's all), which should be 'end' as in begin/end in pascal.

The main point still stands - it's Pascal.

Since I know russian well, here's a proper translation for y'all

    FUNC FACT (N);
       NAMES: P;           (* variable names *)
       1 -> P;
       FOR I FROM 1 TO N ::
          P * I -> P
       DONE                (* endif *)
    RET: P                 (* return value *)
    END;                   (* end of function *)
    
    FOR N FROM 0 TO 6 ::
       ? "FACT(", N, ") = ", FACT(Н)   (* print *)
    DONE;

I would read «КНЦ» as «КОНЕЦ», literally “an end” or “the end” (Russian does not have anything resembling articles). Who needs vowels, anyway.

Also, «ВСЕ» feels like «ВСЁ» in this context, I’d translate that as “that’s all”.

1C is widely used in Russia as part of 1C:Enterprise (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1C:Enterprise think sap/abap)

UPD: 1C can be used in both Russian and English. And I'm pretty sure it can be used outside of 1C:Enterprise.

It also has BSL Language Server and IDEA\VSCode extensions.

I dont use any of them, but here's a list of non-english programming languages that some people probably use day-to-day

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Non-English-based_programming_...

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rapira

> 1982

Rapira appears to be a direct latinisation of the name of the language.